The number of pageviews a website obtains is becoming increasingly more important to webmasters and marketers. Generally, the more pageviews your website gets, the higher the worth of your traffic, and the higher return on investment (ROI) you get on paid sources of traffic.
Consequently, many different tools and WordPress plugins have stepped up to help satisfy this need for more pageviews. But no pageview-boosting plugin type is more popular than related content plugins.
Related content plugins display links to related posts at the end of each post (or, in some cases, throughout the post). It encourages further browsing by users who came to your site to read your content.
There are quite a few related content plugins available for download at the WordPress plugin repository. Some do the job quite admirably, while others fall short of the acceptable mark. To help you decide which related content plugin to use to boost your website’s pageviews, here’s a handpicked list of 6 of best content related plugins.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
With a name like that, your first reaction may be that YARPP probably isn’t the hottest related content plugin around.
YARPP is the most popular plugin in its category, with a whopping 3 million downloads. The plugin is extremely simple to configure—it only takes seconds to set it up in working order after downloading it.
The plugin allows you to choose between a thumbnail and list view of related content. Its advanced algorithm can sift through posts, pages, and custom post types in search of relevant content. You can display lists of related posts in RSS feeds with custom styling options.
WordPress Related Posts
WordPress Related Posts is another very popular related content plugin, having been downloaded more than 1.1 million times.
Developed by the capable developers over at Zemanta, WordPress Related Posts is power packed with several features. Although you cannot choose a text-only view (all related posts are displayed with their accompanying thumbnail), you can customize the size and style of the thumbnail, except for the number of posts displayed.
The plugin’s display is responsive, and allows you to display excerpts (for which the length is customizable), publish date, and number of comments alongside each post thumbnail. It also allows you to display related content from across the Internet (not content just limited to your own site).
Contextual Related Posts
Contextual Related Posts has 383,000 downloads, and is a powerful related content plugin for your website and RSS feed.
With this plugin you can choose to make the related content list based on either the title of the post, or the actual content. There are few other plugins that offer this novel feature, which could end up making quite a difference in the end.
CRP’s dashboard can be a bit daunting at first sight due to the extensive options available. Multiple styles, a shortcode [crp] to display related content within post/page content, and thumbnail customization options are all built into this plugin.
nRelate
nRelate claims to be “the best way to display related content” on your site—they go as far as to say that they aren’t just another related posts plugin, in direct defiance of YARPP’s name!
Although it’s far from the absolute best related content plugin, nRelate does have more than enough capability to keep it in the race. It can display related content before and after a post, and comes with a built-in related content widget.
You can even make a little money with the plugin—nRelate allows you to advertise links from other websites in the related content section.
It’s quite popular, having accumulated half a million downloads.
Reverb for Publishers
Reverb for Publishers is an elegant related posts plugin with a great suite of features.
The plugin’s looks are quite superb—multiple creative styles are offered for both thumbnail and text views of the related content lists. All the links it creates are indexable and beneficial to your site’s SEO.
It also comes with a unique widget that keeps a record of the most frequently mentioned concepts on your blog (people, places, and things). Currently, Reverb’s algorithm only supports English blogs, and has been downloaded more than 10,000 times.
Better Related Posts
Better Related Posts is a highly rated plugin that allows you to display related posts, pages, and custom post types on your blog and in your RSS feed.
It takes only a few seconds to setup the plugin on your blog, but if you’d like to tinker around with it a bit and make it integrate better with your theme, the plugin author has documentation for that as well.
With 54,000 downloads, Better Related Posts is definitely not the most popular plugin on this list, but it has achieved an impressive 4.5 star rating.
Of the 6 plugins we’ve looked at, my first choice would definitely be YARPP—its lightweight, simple, and suits my website’s needs perfectly.Which related content plugin is your favorite? Let us know in the comments!
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